TITLE: We cater for your reproductive needs
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: Horror
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmgenes.jpg
ZIPFILE: pdmgenes.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1d Macintosh PPC

TOOLS USED: 

    Poser 4.0

RENDER TIME: 
    0 hours 22 minutes 17.0 seconds (1337 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    A display of genetically-engineered children.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

After various false starts and ideas, a television documentary about how
children in future could have various genetic improvements inspired me.

It may not be a traditional horror scene, but the documentary showed
examples such as mice with a gene transplanted from a jellyfish, which
makes the mice luminous.  Just think - a glow-in-the-dark child - you'd
never need a nightlight for the kids!
Another kid has an enlarged head, to give more room for its enlarged
brain, and the third is intended to have enhanced disease resistance,
but I couldn't work out how to represent that one visually :-) .

This is probably a risky subject for a Horror image - while the sort
of genetic changes on the documentary struck me as horrific, they didn't
seem to bother the presenters.


On the technical side, I spent some time trying to make my POV person
from the Unbelievable round good enough to appear in close-up, but I
finally had to give up, due to some real-life commitments and my
inability to get the matrix calculations that I needed coded up in time.

I got the Poser 4.0 upgrade this week, and decided to give in and use
mesh objects output from that for the people in this scene.  However,
the first infant I converted took over 2Mb of disk space!  So I reverted
to an idea that I've used before, and used the output images as image
maps or "cardboard cut outs".  They looked reasonable enough at the
small preview size, so I rendered the image at 800x600 with anti-aliasing.

That's when I saw the white dots everywhere... so I redid the images used
for the bitmaps, to improve them, and rerendered - since it was after 2am
on November 1st, I decided I couldn't use anti-aliasing after all.

And the white dots are still visible, though not as bad as before :-( .

Having spent so much time on it, I decided I would have to submit it
anyway.  I can't get it any better tonight.